Are there
much surer than our art is sure.”
The poem is George
Herbert’s “Providence.” Plague is not a metaphor. In July 1625,
when the disease raged in London, Herbert fled to the house of his mother and
stepfather in Chelsea. That December, John Donne stayed there with Herbert and
his family. Two years earlier, when Donne believed he had contracted the disease,
he composed “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness,” which begins:
“Since I am
coming to that holy room,
Where, with thy choir of saints for
evermore,
I shall be
made thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here
before.”
The plague
swept through London in three waves during Donne’s decade-long tenure as dean
of St. Paul's Cathedral. With each recurrence it killed tens of thousands.
“Providence”
is among Herbert’s longest, most discursive poems, a hymn to God’s beneficent ordering
of the universe. Darwin can’t touch our appreciation of the poem:
“Sheep eat
the grasse, and dung the ground for more:
Trees after bearing
drop their leaves for soil:
Springs vent
their streams, and by expense get store:
Clouds cool
by heat, and baths by cooling boil.”
Herbert
seems to intuit the functioning of the nitrogen cycle and the physics of
condensation. In Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert
(University of Chicago Press, 2014), John Drury says bluntly: “It is an
enjoyable poem.” He quotes the third stanza–
“Beasts fain
would sing; birds dittie to their notes;
Trees would
be tuning on their native lute
To thy
renown: but all their hands and throats
Are brought
to Man, while they are lame and mute.”
--and
writes: “Praise, the expression of harmonious fulfillment, rings through ["Providence"] as
jovially as through Haydn’s Creation.”
Herbert was
born on this date, April 3, in 1593.
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